A Bomb Built in Hell

ruins ... shots fired, an occasional scream.

The woman kept backing toward the hut. Stupid bitch, he thought. She was going to die or worse if she didn’t get into the brush fast. The woman ducked into the hut and came out in a second holding a naked little male child under her left arm. The right hand still held the knife. Wesley watched as she faded into the jungle. He was still staring at the spot when the others came up behind him.

On the way back, Wesley forced himself to think about what had happened. He finally realized the only reason he didn’t blow her away at first was because it wasn’t consistent with his image of himself to kill a woman. And besides, it was the motherfucking colonel that talked about wiping them all out and he never went with them, so fuck him and his orders—that was consistent.

But when Wesley saw her face, he had been afraid for just a split second. It wasn’t until she came out of the hut that Wesley realized the crazy woman was willing to die to protect the little kid. He remembered her face and her look. If his mother had looked like that, maybe he wouldn’t have been raised by the State. But he had never seen his mother as far as he could recall, so he just didn’t know....

When they kill only the male children, they make one big motherfucker of a mistake, he thought.

73/

The next morning, Wesley told the kid they weren’t even going to meet Norden, much less cancel his ticket or his wife’s. He watched the kid’s face closely, pleased to see no trace of disappointment ... or happiness. It was always bad news when the bomb started to need the target.

But the kid was still puzzled. “What’s the next thing?”

“I don’t know, kid. There’s a reason why I didn’t want to go out with Pet. The methadone clinic was part of it ... and some other stuff, too ... just before that creep at the racetrack.”

“What stuff?”

“That sicko, the freak who went around here cutting little kids with a razor, you know who I mean?”

“Yeah. They never caught him, right? He’s still out there?”

“He’s in the morgue. I hit him on the Slip the night I brought the dog home, a long time before you came.”

“That was the right thing to do. If I was the fucking heat and I came on him, I’d never bring him in.”

“They wouldn’t bring me in either, right? And I didn’t hit him for that. Remember: all dead meat brings flies. He was the same as the methadone clinic to me.”

“Because?”

“Because baby-rapers bring the law—they always do, just like the dope fiends bring it. So he had to go. I thought he was cutting on a kid out there, but after I hit him it turned out to be the dog.”

“How’d you know where to look for him?”

“I learned in prison. If I was a cop, there’d be a whole lot of sorry motherfuckers out there.”

“How’d you hit him?”

“With the target pistol, at about fifty feet.”

“That don’t seem right to me. Like you showing him too much respect, you know? You maybe should of slashed his fucking throat.”

“He’s just as dead this way. You think they’d pin a fucking medal on me for whacking him out?”

“No, I know they don’t do that.”

“They used to do it, right? I got a couple of medals in Korea for shit like that ... stupid.”

“For giving you the medals?”

“Me, for doing their fucking killing for them.”

“You did Carmine’s killing for him....”

“Carmine made it my own killing.... And even if it wasn’t, I had to kill them so I could do my own.”

“At the racetrack?”

“No. I thought that was it. But, if it was, I’d go on this Norden thing, right? In fact, that’s the one thing been on my mind for a long time.”

“Why just that?” the kid asked.

“Meaning...?”

“Why just killing—there’s other things.”

“That’s all I know how to... Look, you got a woman?”

“No, not right now. I mean, there’s a girl I go and see sometimes, but I can’t make anything regular out of it....”

“But you can have one if you want, right? You can talk to them? Talk to all kinds of people out there,” he gestured with a wide sweep of his hand to encompass the city. “Right?”

“Just some kind of people, really....”